Founding Engineer, AI Infrastructure

Back to Careers Founding Engineer, AI Infrastructure Software / Systems San Francisco (in-person) Full-time Apply Now ABOUT US We are building the next generation of AI inference infrastructure. Our mission is to make large-scale model serving dramatically faster, more efficient, and more reliable by tightly integrating software orchestration with next-generation GPU and networking architectures. We believe the future of AI infrastructure will be defined not just by larger models, but by how effectively those models are distributed across nodes, networks, regions, and heterogeneous hardware. We're assembling a small, high-caliber engineering team to build that future from the ground up. THE ROLE We are looking for a Founding AI Infrastructure Engineer to help architect and build our inference platform from first principles. This is not a traditional backend role. You will work across the entire inference stack, from control plane orchestration to distributed serving systems, networking, scheduling, observability, and performance optimization. You will help solve some of the hardest problems in AI infrastructure. As one of the first engineers, you will have enormous influence over our architecture, engineering culture, hiring strategy, and product direction. This role is designed for builders who want to create foundational technology, not maintain existing systems. WHAT YOU WILL WORK ON Multi-node inference Network-aware request routing Distributed KV-cache management Scale-to-zero and instant scale-up Multi-cloud GPU orchestration Cluster scheduling and placement High-performance networking Resource isolation and multi-tenancy Large-scale observability and reliability WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR Strong Technical Foundations: exceptional fundamentals in distributed systems, networking, operating systems, databases, concurrency, and systems design. Builder Mentality: you enjoy building new systems from scratch and taking ownership of ambiguous, high-impact problems. Programming Excellence: strong experience in one or more of Go, Rust, C++, or Python. Infrastructure Experience: experience with Kubernetes, Linux systems, containers, service meshes, cloud infrastructure, and infrastructure automation. High Learning Velocity: we care more about your ability to learn and execute than your years of experience. PARTICULARLY EXCITING BACKGROUNDS AI infrastructure companies, distributed databases, high-performance networking, cloud infrastructure platforms, GPU systems, HPC environments, Kubernetes platforms, and large-scale backend systems. Experience with technologies such as Kubernetes, Envoy, eBPF, OpenTelemetry, vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM, NCCL, RDMA, and InfiniBand is a strong plus, but not required. WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE Within your first year, you will help build a production-grade distributed inference platform, multi-node model serving capabilities, intelligent global request routing, automated GPU fleet management, and the foundation of our engineering organization. WHY JOIN Founding engineer equity Competitive salary and benefits Direct access to customers and product decisions Significant technical ownership from day one Opportunity to build category-defining AI infrastructure Work alongside engineers solving some of the most challenging systems problems in modern computing Compensation: $100,000–$200,000 depending on experience, plus equity, 401(k), health insurance, and benefits keyvan@pirislabs.io Apply Now